Graal Project a quest for the JVM to leverage its own J Mission The Graal OpenJDK project grew out of the Maxine VM project. In the context of the Maxine VM, Graal demonstrated that a compiler written in Java (with all its software engineering advantages) could generate highly optimized code without compromising on compile times. Graal was then spun off as an OpenJDK project in 2012 to bring these